An application executing on a data processing system may access the memory of the data processing system. If there are many memory accesses, the application may suffer performance degradation as the application waits for a cache memory to be populated with relevant cache lines. Some data processor architectures allow prefetches to be used which request that memory is preloaded into the cache before it is used by the application. However, prefetches can sometimes cause performance degradation by increasing memory traffic.
It is an object of embodiments of the invention to at least mitigate one or more of the problems of the prior art.